How to Write a Killer Headline

If your brand is active online today, blogging regularly should be near the top of your marketing to-do list. Regularly publishing content provides a regular stream of value to your audience and makes you increasingly visible to the SEO gods. But even if you’ve written a brilliant post, it won’t reach its maximum audience without a great headline.

Here are a few things you can do to ensure your post has a catchy, clickable headline that maximizes your content’s potential reach.

Don’t sweat the title initially.

A great headline will come out of the post you write, so don’t feel pressure to come up with a brilliant title before you even start writing the post. Quickly drum up a basic working title that clearly states what you’re setting out to do, you can dress it up later.

Punch it up.

Take that initial title and make it a little fancier. Use wordplay like alliteration, simile, or metaphor to expand the reader’s ideas of what might be possible in the blog they are about to read. Using controversial (nothing too crazy) or colloquial language can be another way to catch your audience off guard and pique their interest.

Don’t get too abstract.

Remember, you’re writing a blog title. When you’re dressing up your title to look and feel a little more exciting, try not to go overboard. It’s not an academic paper and it’s not a novel or short story. Readers shouldn’t have to get to the end of the post itself in order to understand what you meant by your title.

Be concise.

On that same note, don’t get too wordy. You’re trying to impress your readers with how much value in the form of relevant information you can give them, not with how smart you are. If your title requires a colon and two independent sentences, it’s too long. Make it enticing enough to draw them in but not so long that reading it is tiresome.